Brothers' Keepers, or,
The Performance of Mourning:
Queer Rituals of Remembrance
PETER DICKINSON
Peter Dickinson is Assistant Professor in the Department of English
at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Here is Queer:
Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada ( U of
Toronto P, /999), and editor of Literatures, Cinemas, Cultures, a
special issue of the journal Essays on Canadian Writing (#76, 2002 ).
Recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Canadian
Journal of Film Studies, Modem Drama, Screen, and Biography.
One cannot hold a discourse on the "work of mourning"
without taking part in it, without announcing or
partaking in death, and first of all in one's own death.
-Jacques Derrida, "By Force of Mourning" (172)
What grief displays ... is the thrall in which our relations with
others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain,
in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of
ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge
the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control.
-Judith Butler, Precarious Life (23)
But it may well be that theatre and performance respond to a
psychic need to rehearse for Joss, and especially for death.
-Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex (3)
I
n her recent book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence, Judith Butler picks up the threads of an argument first
sketched in her Antigone's Claim; with some political urgency,
especially in the wake of 9/11, she asks how one moves beyond the
preoccupation with individual human agency implicit in the question,
"What makes for a grievable life?," to a recognition that "[l]oss has
torquere: Journal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association !
Revue de Ia Societe canadienne des etudes lesbiennes et gaies
Vol. 6 (2004) © CLGSA/ SCELG
Brothers' Keepers I 13
made a tenuous 'we' of us all" (20; emphasis in original).
Acknowledging the terrible and terrifying effects of violence to which
sexual and other minorities are routinely subjected, Butler
nevertheless posits that
each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the
social vulnerability of our bodies-as a site of desire and
physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive
and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from
our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at
risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk
of violence by virtue of that exposure. (20)
For Butler, then, the more important question becomes how we
"transform" or "translate" (to use her words) this loss into a new
social ethics and political responsibility, reconfiguring a "model of
the human" that accounts for the "you" in "me," and that bears
witness to the fact that "I am as much constituted by those I do grieve
for as by those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless and faceless
deaths form the melancholic background for my social world" (46,
49).
In this paper, I want to build on Butler's insights here and
elsewhere (especially in Antigone's Claim), theorizing the political
responsibility and social vulnerability that specifically attend queer
rituals of remembrance, as well as some of the masculine-and
masculinist-teleologies at the heart of these rituals. How do I grieve
for the "man" lost in "human," when it is mostly straight white men
who have insisted historically that the latter category is one whose
loss as a mode of address must be rehearsed over and over again by
all the rest of us? How could I ever call such a man my brother? I
explore these and related questions by stressing both the performative
and the local applications of a queer theory of mourning. As such, I
preface my paper with a brief survey of some spaces of remembrance
that in many respects constitute "a landscape of memorialization" 1
particular to Vancouver, and that thus serve as the immediate
backdrop to my thinking about the larger issues circulating in the
1 I borrow this phrase from Sharon Rosenberg, who coined it in correspondence
with me about my paper. I am extremely grateful to Sharon for the guidance and
engaged colloquy she has provided on my work, and on the work of mourning more
generally, throughout the course of revising this paper.
14 I Dickinson
ensuing pages. In suggesting a "nervous mutating catastrophic reach"
to these spaces, and the traumatic events they commemorate, a reach
that extends beyond Vancouver and, more importantly, my own
immediate experiencing of them, I am structuring my paper along
the lines of the model for "performative writing" adopted by Peggy
Phelan in her brilliant book Mourning Sex: Performing Public
Memories. There, Phelan notes that "[p]erformative writing is an
attempt to find a form for 'what philosophy wishes all the same to
say."' She continues:
Rather than describing the performance event in "direct
signification," a task that I believe to be impossible and not
terrifically interesting, I want this writing to enact the
affective force of the performance event again, as it plays
itself out in an ongoing temporality made vivid by the
psychic process of distortion (repression, fantasy, and the
general hubbub of the individual and collective unconscious), and made narrow by the muscular force of
political repression in all its mutative violence. The events I
disclose here sound differently in the writing of them than
in the "experiencing" of them, and it is the urgent call of
that difference that I am hoping to amplify here. ( 11-12)
In the main sections of this paper, then, I am likewise seeking
to amplify a difference, focussing on four specifically theatrical
performances of mourning in order to note how their respective
Vancouver stagings speak both to my own evolving memorialization
of the city in which I live, and to a communal history of queer
witnessing whose narrative lacunae are precisely what constitute the
act of memorialization itself. As Butler puts it, "I tell a story about
the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way,
the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My
narrative falters, as it must" (Precarious Life 23). To this end, I look
initially, and most extensively, at the performance work of Margie
Gillis and Paula Vogel, women who have both lost biological brothers
to AIDS (Christopher Gillis and Carl Vogel, respectively), and who,
moreover, have both sought to memorialize their brothers' lives in
specific works of art: Gillis in the solo dance piece Torn Roots,
Broken Branches and Vogel in the Obie Award-winning play The
Baltimore Waltz. The public performance of bereavement by these
two women, its ritual repetition, is not, I argue, a narcissistic
Brothers' Keepers I 15
capitulation to grief-as Freud's notion of melancholia would have
it-but rather an acknowledgment of community, a symbolic
representation of collective struggle in response to an unprecedented
social crisis, one that allows for the sharing of loss and the
ritualization of remembrance as a precursor to organization and a
demand for change.
Here, in theorizing the performance of mourning contra Freud,
I will be drawing primarily on the work oftwo of his more important
contemporary interlocutors. In particular, I will be using Butler's
influential notion of "gender melancholia," as she has developed and
refined the concept over the course of Gender Trouble, Bodies That
Matter and, most recently, Antigone's Claim and Precarious Life, and
as she has used it to (re)read Freudian (and Lacanian) psychoanalysis
in order to demonstrate that homosexual cathexis must precede ego
identification and the successful resolution of the Oedipal complex.
This will aid in unpacking how performative memorialization
overlaps with queer kinship in the texts by Gillis and Vogel. Relatedly,
I will also be working from the model for social praxis on offer in
Douglas Crimp's important essay "Mourning and Militancy," which
takes as its central premise (one that I share) the absolutely necessary
connection between mourning/remembrance and activism, especially
in the context of the queer community's responses to the AIDS
pandemic and decades of unabated anti-gay violence.
I conclude my paper with a very brief analysis of two queer
plays which each, in their own way, seek to memorialize-in order
to attempt to make sense of-the murder of Matthew Shepard.
Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, ap. intensely homoerotic retelling
of the Biblical passion story, was the subject of bomb threats and
picketing when it opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club in the fall
of 1998. Following Shepard's murder in October of that year,
McNally included a preface in the published version of the play that makes a direct link between the crucifixion of the play's fictional
gay protagonist, Joshua, and that of the real-life Shepard. Moises
Kaufman and Tectonic Theater's The Laramie Project is based on
interviews with residents of Laramie, Wyoming in the immediate
aftermath of Shepard's killing; a dozen or so actors voice the words
of more than fifty distraught, angry, uncomprehending, and mediaweary citizens-as well as their own-in an effort to tell the story
of this community and, in the words of one resident/character, "say
16 I Dickinson
it right" (100). The play was recently made into an HBO movie with
a who's who of high-profile Hollywood stars. 2
Both plays are large ensemble pieces that eschew explicit focus
on the homosexual victim-as-martyr in favour of a dissection
(McNally allegorically, Kaufman documentarily) of the community
that produced his homophobic killers. These men, equally our
brothers, how do we remember them? I attempt to answer this
question by first focussing on a key theatrical convention employed
by each play, and then by returning to my opening framing discussion
of the specific orientations of queer remembrance in Vancouver via
references to local stagings of each play in 2002 (i.e., Hoarse Raven's
production of Corpus Christi at Festival House in May and Studio
58's production of The Laramie Project in October). There, I will
offer some final Butlerian remarks on mourning and melancholiaand what remains "unspeakable" in each-within the context of the
Vancouver queer community's determined efforts to remember Aaron
Webster, killed by gay bashers in the same park from which an AIDS
Memorial has been barred as unsuitable.
The Landscape of Remembrance
This last point refers to a particular confluence of the local and the
performative that has necessarily influenced the writing and revising
of this paper. I am speaking of the completion (in July 2004) and
dedication (on 1 December 2004, in a ceremony that coincided with
World AIDS Day) of a long-planned, and long-delayed, memorial
to British Columbians who have died of AIDS. The site of the
memorial is Sunset Beach West, along a grassy and lightly treed knoll
at the foot of Broughton Street and Beach Avenue, in the heart of
downtown's West End and a short walk east of English Bay and the
Stanley Park seawall. Its design consists of a series of 20 steel panels,
each close to a metre in width, cut into and winding through the
adjacent landscape like a ribbon unfurling in the wind. The
memorial's foundation, like Maya Lin's famous Vietnam Veterans'
Memorial in Washington, DC, follows the natural grade level of the
site, resulting in a height ranging from 0.75-1.5 metres (see figure
2 The Laramie Project (2002). Directed by Moises Kaufman. Written by
Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project. Produced by Declan Baldwin.
New York: HBO Home Video, 96 min.
Brothers' Keepers I 17
1). Again much like Lin's design, the panels that comprise the
Vancouver AIDS Memorial have been laser cut with the names of
those who have died from the disease, signifying "their absence from
our lives" (Vancouver AIDS Memorial). Small holes have been
placed next to each name so that mourners and visitors to the
memorial might leave flowers or other tokens of remembrance for
lost loved ones. Finally, the following stanza from Spanish-American
writer George Santayana's 1896 commemorative verse "To W.P."
scrolls above the names, at the top of the memorial:
With you a part of me hath passed away,
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by the wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, your mellow ease,
And the dear honor of your amity;
For those once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,What I keep of you, or you rob of me.
(Sonnets and Other Verses 61)
Despite the performance of civic harmony that attended the
official ground-breaking ceremony for the memorial in May 2002,
and that was likewise featured prominently at the official dedication
ceremony in December 2004, public goodwill surrounding the project
has not always been very much in evidence. Nor was Sunset Beach;
chosen only after an especially arduous and acrimonious two-year
public consultation process in June 1998, the site originally proposed
for the memorial. Indeed, when the then fledgling AIDS Memorial
Committee, working in an ad hoc manner under the auspices of AIDS
Vancouver and the Pacific AIDS Resource Centre, first approached
the Vancouver Parks Board in 1996 about installing a public
monument to the memory of those who have died from AIDS, they
proposed a site adjacent Ceperley Park, near the Second Beach
18 I Dickinson
entrance to Stanley Park. This proposal was endorsed by the Parks
Board at an in-camera meeting in November 1996. However, when
word of the planned memorial and its proposed location leaked to
the press, there was an immediate public outcry. Ostensibly, debate
centred around the lack of public consultation surrounding the
process, but various media polls conducted during the period
repeatedly suggested that what people most objected to was the
choice of Stanley Park as the site for the AIDS Memorial-and
precisely because the spot was deemed too public (see Fraser).
Ceperley Park, a highly trafficked part of Stanley Park, popular
with both locals and tourists alike, and home to a playground and
picnic area frequented by young children and families, was deemed
inappropriate for a memorial to AIDS victims. Wasn't it enough that
the area was annually turned into the start and end point for the
Vancouver AIDS Walk every September? A more discreet location
should be found for a permanent memorial. Of course what remained
unacknowledged throughout this public discourse on the discourse
of publicness was that the woods just north of Ceperley Park are
highly trafficked in another way-namely, as a late-night cruising
ground for gay, bisexual and otherwise identified men seeking sex
Figure 1: Vancouver AIDS Memorial, Sunset Beach, Vancouver
(Photo © Pete r Dickinson)
Brothers' Keepers I 19
with other men. In the homophobic equation of "gay sex = AIDS"
that frequently subtended the debates around erecting a memorial at
Ceperley, what remained palpable--even when unspoken-was the
feeling that the gay community wished to flaunt itself in broad
daylight yet again, that it was somehow rubbing normal Vancouverites' (and, indeed, the world's) noses in a killing field of its
own making, one that had best remain hidden away in the dark. Never
mind that the killings that go on in this field in Stanley Park under
cover of darkness, killings that remain un- or under-memorialized
within Vancouver public discourse, have nothing at all to do with
the human immunodeficiency virus, and everything to do with
"normal" boys who carry baseball bats-a point to which I will return
at the end of this essay.
Vancouver's recent history has been particularly vexed on the
subject of public memorials. For example, the fallout attending the
December 1997 unveiling of artist Beth Alber's Marker of Change
memorial in Thornton Park, commemorating the lives of the fourteen
women murdered by Marc Lepine at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique
eight years earlier, rehearsed in many ways the same debates around
intentionality and appropriateness that have characterized the AIDS
Memorial. The conservative local press, led by Vancouver Sun
columnist Trevor Lautens, and North Vancouver Reform Party MP
Ted White, were particularly aggrieved by the fact that the Women's
Monument Project (a feminist collective working out of Capitano
College overseeing the design competition, fundraising, and eventual
installation of Alber's sculpture), like the AIDS Memorial Society
of Vancouver, saw the Marker of Change not merely as commemorative but also as explicitly educative, a way of focussing immediate
local attention on the ongoing global phenomenon of male violence
against women (see Lautens; Duncan). Clearly the memorial was
meant as a feminist indictment of men, the argument went, and, as
such, could not be seen as representative of a spirit of shared
remembrance in any way. In this regard, critics pointed to the phrase
"for all women who have been murdered by men" in the memorial's
dedication plaque as unnecessarily provocative.
That same year, Vancouver resident Don Larson angered many
in the First Nations community when he spearheaded a campaign to
create a monument honouring the memories of the women (many
of them Aboriginal sex trade workers) who began disappearing from
20 I Dickinson
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DES) at a statistical rate of
approximately two per year in the early 1980s, a phenomenon that
was met with what now seems willful inattention on the part of police
and the local media. 3 Despite the fact that the First Nations
community had for several years been staging a public performance
of remembrance and a call to action for these same women in the
form of a "smudge ceremony," accompanied by demonstrations held
each Valentine's Day (see Kelley), Larson-who is white-went
ahead and unilaterally commissioned the design of a memorial
boulder. The boulder was installed in CRAB (Create a Real Available
Beach) Park-3.5 hectares of reclaimed land along the waterfront
at the foot of Main Street, in the heart of the DES's skid row (a
memorial bench was dedicated separately in March 2000). The fact
that the monument's dedicatory inscription appropriates a traditional
First Nations' "form of address ['All my relations'] ... used to begin
or end a prayer, speech, or story" (Bold et al. 24) only added insult
to injury. In the wake of Robert Pickton's arrest and arraignment on
charges of murdering fifteen of the more than 60 women currently
identified as missing (see note 3), and as Aboriginal and nonAboriginal artists alike have begun to exhibit with increasing
frequency memorial installations to the murdered and disappeared
women, 4 family members have begun to discuss--and argue aboutplans for a new permanent and official monument.
3 In their article "'How Might a Women 's Monument Be Different?,"' Christine
Bold, Ric Knowles, and Belinda Leach discuss in more detail the public debates that
greeted both Alber's Marker of Change and Larson's efforts to remember the missing
women from Vancouver's DES, situating those debates within the context of a larger
project about feminist memorialization in Canada Despite substantial evidence and
ongoing pressure from the local community and relatives, Vancouver police refused
throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s to acknowledge a connection between
the missing women from the DES, or to entertain the possibility that a serial murderer
might be preying upon them. It was only in 2001 that the police, in conjunction with
the RCMP, set up a special Missing Women Task Force; a year later, in February
2002, Robert "Willie" Pickton, a 53-year-old pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, was
finally arrested in connection with the case. A terrible irony is that Picktonhad been
in police custody back in 1997 on charges of stabbing a local prostitute; however, the
charges were stayed, and Pickton was released (see Joyce; "Vancouver's legacy").
4 See, for example, Rebecca Belmore 's mixed media installations "Vigil" and
"The Named and the Unnamed," which were shown in her solo show The Named
and the Unnamed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver from
October-December 2002, before traveling to the Art Gallery of Ontario; see, as well,
Brothers' Keepers I 21
More recently, Vancouver veterans reacted with outrage when,
in the summer of 2003, a loose coalition of youthful protestors
wishing to focus attention on homelessness, poverty, and City Hall's
repeated delays in converting the abandoned Woodward's Building
to social housing, set up an impromptu squat at Victory Square, site
of the cenotaph commemorating British Columbians who lost their
lives in World Wars I and II. The veterans saw the squatters' actions
as a desecration and a violation of public memorial space devoted
to the preservation of the past; they also worried that the protest
would delay plans by the city to renovate and spruce up the memorial
site in time for November Remembrance Day activities. For their
part, the squatters argued that their occupation of the square
constituted a different kind of (re)memorialization, a protest against
the city's active forgetting of its spatial present (see Fong). Ironically,
when forced by a police injunction to vacate Victory Square, the
protesters split their forces, with half decamping to CRAB Park, and
the other half to Thornton Park.
"The Protocols of Mourning"
At the heart of these debates are some fundamentally difficult and
necessarily polarizing questions about public memory, memorialization, and mourning: Who gets to publicly remember, for whom,
where, in what ways, and how? What constitutes an appropriate
(there's that word again) display-psychically, materially-of
mourning? When does respectful remembrance cross the line into
social activism? And how are all of these rituals further complicated
by what Marianne Hirsch and others have called the phenomenon of
"postmemory" (see especially Hirsch's Family Frames), in which the
"performance" of remembrance via internet sites, television shows,
and other media technologies designed to remember for us, produces
a constant-though necessarily simulacra) and ersatz--condition of
reminiscence and retrospection that signals not so much a felt
connection with the past (including the very recent past) as a profound
disconnection from it? For Andreas Huyssen, this globalized penchant
for instant memorialization-in everything from hurried architectural
Kati Campbell's textile installation "67 Shawls," which was shown as part of a group
show called Talking Textile (which also featured work by Belmore) at the Richmond
Art Gallery from December 2003-January 2004.
22 I Dickinson
competitions to rebuild Ground Zero in New York City to more
populist expressions of remembrance, such as roadside displays of
flowers marking the site of a car crash-has, paradoxically, produced
what he calls a "culture of amnesia," whose primary symptom is the
"atrophy" of historical consciousness, aided and abetted by a hightech "media world spinning a cocoon of timeless claustrophobia and
nightmarish phantasms and simulation," in which there is "nothing to
remember, nothing to forget" (Twilight Memories 7, 9). However, as
Richard Cavell has recently pointed out, Huyssen's argument is
profoundly "normative": "there are good memories and there are bad
memories for [Huyssen], and bad memories usually tend to be
associated with populist expression-what one might call 'history
from below' as opposed to the official or institutional histories most
often valorised by the state" ("Histories of Forgetting" 2).
Although Huyssen has since revised his take somewhat in his
book Present Pasts, even there his critical perspective "is guided by
the conviction that too much of the contemporary memory discourse
focuses on the personal" (8), especially with respect to episodes of
trauma. Such sentiments issue from the statist view that nations, for
example, primarily build public monuments to-and organize
museums around-great events and great men. These spatial aids to
memory (what Pierre Nora has theorized, in the French context, as
les lieux de memoire; see his three-volume study of the same name),
so the theory goes, in turn help citizens remember iconographically,
ensuring that, in the present, we will not forget the past, lest we repeat
its mistakes. But this somewhat naively holistic and ameliorative
view of historical memory as a collective cultural repository from
which humanity progresses forward is, it seerris to me, undercut by
precisely the more populist, impromptu, localized, and, yes,
performative forms of memorialization that Huyssen eschews from
his analysis. Take, for example, a queer ritual of remembrance such
as the Names Project Memorial Quilt, and its relation to how bodies
(as opposed to monuments) re-member space, be it the space of a
national government capital or the space of history. What the formerly
semi-regular unfurling of the quilt on the grounds of the National
Mall in Washington, D.C. 5 demonstrated most vividly was that
5 The Quilt, which now comprises some 45,000 panels, weighs more than 54
tons, and covers approximately 1,270,350 square feet (or roughly the equivalent of
Brothers' Keepers I 23
recovering a narrative of collective memory need not be at the
expense of all of the individual bodies and personal stories subsumed
within that narrative; nor must memorialization's pedagogical
function be separated from its political one. 6 Each vibrantly sewn
and personalized panel seeks to preserve individual eccentricities and
encapsulate the life story of its memorial subject, Jest his or her death
fade into a roll call of anonymous statistics about AIDS' human toll.
At the same time, the display of this individual privation is
undertaken in a highly theatrical, ritualized, and intensely public
manner: each panel is laid out for viewing in an intensely
choreographed manner as the names of persons who have died from
the disease are read out by alternating participants at a microphone.
Carried out in the shadow of a nation's ultimate folly (the hyperphallic Washington Monument), just a short distance away from the
rows of indistinguishable white crosses at Arlington National
Cemetery and from the equally white seat of world democracy from
which issued the edict "Don't ask, don't tell," such a memorial project
is a defiantly personalist resistance of the attempts by governments
to muzzle and displace grief through monumentalist abstraction. The
Quilt insists not only on telling, but also on showing; it is a
performance of mourning that doubles as a political occupation. As
Elinor Fuchs notes in a 1993 article originally published in American
Theatre (and reprinted in her book The Death of Character), the
whole idea of the Quilt,
combining monumentality with patchwork, expresses at
once the scale of the leaping world AIDS crisis and its assault
on humanist faith in order and social continuity. Pastiche
and defiant disunity are by now familiar hallmarks of the
postmodernist artwork, but here they are returned to a
humanism which insists that this exuberant life not be
forgotten. In the way it remembers, the Quilt is more relaxed·,
more inclusive, more sensual, more human, more theatrical
47 football fields if laid end to end), was last displayed in its entirety in October
1996. While portions of the Quilt continue to tour the U.S. and the world, for obvious
logistical reasons there are no immediate plans to assemble and display the whole
thing again; see the AIDS Memorial Quilt website at www.aidsquilt.org.
6 On this point, see especially the essays collected in Roger Simon, Sharon
Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert, eds., Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the
Remembrance of Historical Trauma .
24 I Dickinson
than anything previously imagined in the protocols of
mourning. ( 196)
I want to link up what Fuchs singles out here as the Quilt's
inherent "theatricality," its necessary "imaginativeness," with
Huyssen's speculative hand-wringing about the "cultural amnesia"
that he sees as a worrisome by-product of such memorial projects.
At a physiological level, of course, the cognitive condition of
forgetting must in some senses always precede, even prompt, the
cognitive condition of remembering. That is, an irony that seems to
be lost on Huyssen is that we can only remember something that we
have first forgotten. And how do you remember that which official
or institutional histories of the sort privileged by Huyssen have
refused to record, and thereby literally make impossible to forget? I
overstate my case, to be sure, but I do so in order to make an
important point about the necessarily performative nature of queer
rituals of remembrance and mourning. Phelan puts it this way: "[a]s
an art form whose primary function is to meditate on the threshold
that heralds between-ness, theatre encourages a specific and intense
cathetic response in those who define themselves as liminal tricksters,
socially disenfranchised, sexually aberrant, addicted, and otherwise
queerly alienated from the law of the father. Queers are queer because
we recognize that we have survived our own deaths" (16).
When hate crimes against queers go unreported, when the names
of gay men and lesbians killed in Nazi death camps are nowhere to
be found at the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem, 7 when the
archiving of gay life-Jet alone gay death-has been and continues
to be so scant and piecemeal, how does one remember? One
remembers by sewing a piece of fabric onto another, by staging kissins and die-ins at public institutions in major urban metropolises, by
placing flowers and placards and talismans in a fence in Wyoming
(for a Matthew Shepard) or along a forest path in Vancouver (for an
Aaron Webster), by writing plays and choreographing dances for lost
7 This is not meant to deny the efforts of other memorializations of the Holocaust,
both from within and without the queer community, to record this history of
persecution. See, in particular, the permanent special exhibit at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. on the "Nazi Persecution of
Homosexuals, 1933-1945"; and Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's documentary
film Paragraph 175.
Brothers' Keepers I 25
brothers. In the absence of built monuments, queer acts of
remembrance, witnessing, and mourning necessarily become
ritualized through performance, just as they per force get linked to
local manifestations of grassroots activism. Indeed, a key element
of the organizational success of groups such as ACf UP, AIDS Action
Now, Queer Nation, and Outrage! over the past two decades has been
their recognition of the co-extensiveness of activism and
memorialization, and their ability to adapt the performance of each
to a specific situational context. A march and rally in New York, a
charity concert in London, a candlelight vigil in Toronto or
Vancouver: at some level, with each event, street theatre segues into
social protest, just as the mourning of an individual loss helps to
clarify the "fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility" of
our participation in a "political community of a complex order"
(Butler, Precarious Life 22).
Thus, in much the same way that Fuchs has examined how the
Quilt necessarily sunders "mourning's ancient links to church, family,
class and state" and "re-imagines a connection between politics and
the sacred" (197), I want now, in the remainder of this essay, to tum
to an analysis of the post-AIDS rituals of grieving, remembrance,
art, and social activism in two other performative contexts: dance
and theatre. In so doing, I want to link up Butler's theorizing of the
relationship between mourning and (queer) kinship with a notion of
vigilant remembrance that is both situationally contingent and
relationally binding-if not always politically transformative.
Christopher Gillis, Carl Vogel, Matthew Shepard, Russell Henderson,
Aaron McKinney, Aaron Webster: how am I connected to these men?
Why is it incumbent upon me to remember them? How, to use
Butler's language, does the rehearsal of their deaths, or the deaths
they caused, both constitute me and the other in me? And how does
it undo me (see Precarious Life 22-3)?
Queer Kinship: Gillis and Vogel
Following the 1993 death of her brother, Christopher, who was
himself a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in New York,
Margie Gillis added two new pieces to her staple of solo dances:
Landscape, a stark meditation on impending death choreographed
for her by Christopher from his hospital bed, and Torn Roots, Broken
Branches, a frenzied outpouring of grief that she herself created. In
26 I Dickinson
the first, Gillis enters the stage down right. She wears a simple white
shift reminiscent of a hospital gown and is dragging a bare tree branch
on the floor behind her. A solitary strip of tom cloth has been tied to
one of the branch's outermost limbs, and before the piece is over
Gillis will add another. As the haunting sounds of an Edvard Grieg
composition rise and fall, Gillis begins her long painful walk across
the stage, progressing slowly, in halting and unsure steps. Her
movements, normally Duncanesque in their expansiveness, are here
tiny and contained and precise. Indeed, Gillis's solidity as a dancer,
the generous shape of her arms and legs, makes the frailty of her
gestures in this piece even more powerful and poignant; when, in
the middle of the stage, she stumbles and falls, for example, we know
that something more inevitable and inexorable than mere gravity is
weighing her down. Near the end of Landscape, Gillis glances back
over her shoulder, measuring the distance she has travelled, trying
to bridge the gap between where she has come from and where she
is going. The psychological and spiritual isolation that Christopher
Gillis has attempted to convey with this piece is encapsulated in this
one brief moment and the effect is devastating-knowing this,
devastated herself, his sister, Margie, picks up the branch and
continues on her journey, exiting the stage upper left.
The image of the broken branch is what links Christopher's
vision of his own death with Margie's performance of her mourning.
Brother and sister's respective choreographic styles, however, could
not be more different. In Torn Roots, Broken Branches, the dull grey
backdrop of Landscape is replaced by one that is blood red. The
piece begins with Gillis in the middle of the s~age, hands covering
her face, dressed head to toe in black: black hat, long-sleeved black
bodice buttoned to the throat, full-length black skirt-a formal
funereal shroud that will serve alternately as a prop and a shield,
parts of which Gillis will gradually shed, throughout the next four
minutes. To the keening wail of Sim!ad O'Connor's "I am Stretched
on Your Grave," a contemporary arrangement of a traditional Irish
dirge, Gillis performs her own dance of mourning. As the song picks
up speed, particularly in the closing fiddle section, so too does Gillis,
whirling about in faster and wider circles, shaking her skirts and hair
in fierce fury, her pain and anger and guilt registering ever more
profoundly, ever more clearly, on her face-in the wild look of her
eyes, the tight clench of her jaw. To label the combined effect as
Brothers' Keepers I 27
cathartic does not nearly go far enough in describing what both Gillis
and the audience have been through by the end of the piece. (I speak
from experience, having attended a dance recital by Gillis in
Vancouver in 1994 at which both Landscape and Torn Roots, Broken
Branches were performed.) Indeed, as with Gillis's iconic
predecessor in the dramatization of sisterly grief, Antigone, cathartic
release is arguably replaced by something more akin to empathic
identification. And this, to allude to my opening epigraph from
Derrida, constitutes the "force" of each sister's mourning, as well as
the force of her protest-a point to which I shall shortly return.
Let me speak first, though, to Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz,
which, as she states in her "Playwright's Note," was written as a
direct result of her brother Carl's death from AIDS in 1988. The
published play-text reprints a hilarious and touching letter from
brother to sister regarding the former's wishes for his memorial
service, and Vogel's dedication reads "To the memory of Carlbecause I cannot sew" (101). The play, which premiered at New
York's Circle Repertory Company in 1992 (and received a local
Vancouver production the following spring courtesy of Pink Ink
Theatre), is set in a Baltimore, Maryland hospital. While sitting in a
starkly lit waiting room, "Anna" imagines a final journey to Europe
with her brother, "Carl," who is slowly dying in another room from
AIDS-related pneumonia. It is this dream voyage that comprises most
of the play, and in it Anna, and not Carl, is sick, having contracted
Acquired Toilet Disease or ATD, a fatal illness spread through
contaminated potty seats that seems to afflict mostly single female
elementary school teachers. Having learned from Anna's doctor about
the experimental research of one Dr. Todesrocheln, a Viennese
urologist, and having packed, upon the instructions of his old
university pal, Harry Lime, his childhood stuffed rabbit, Carl whisks
his sister off to Europe for what she thinks will be a final fling, but
what he hopes will result in a cure.
In a swift progression of 30 short scenes Anna and Carl hop
from Paris to Amsterdam to Berlin to Vienna, all the while trailed
by a shadowy figure referred to in the text only as the "Third Man,"
a composite character who has the disconcerting habit of
metamorphosizing, depending upon the specific locale, into either a
potential lover for Anna or a possible enemy for Carl. In these scenes
Vogel skewers every conceivable stereotype and convention, from
28 I Dickinson
the linguistic trials of American tourists to the new age wisdom of
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross:
CARL: Calm down, sweetie. You're angry. It's only natural to be
angry. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross says thatANNA: What does she know about what it feels like to die?! Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross can sit on my face. (114-15)
The production notes for The Baltimore Waltz call for a lavish,
wildly varied, and deliberately cliched musical score. And, as with
Gillis's performance, dance becomes the carapace both of a brother's
death and a sister's mourning. In the final three scenes, for example,
Vogel carefully choreographs the climax and rapid denouement of the
play around the hackneyed violin strains of three successive Strauss
waltzes. In the first of these scenes, a conscious homage to the
climactic confrontation between Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in
the 1949 film version of The Third Man, Carl and his friend-turnednemesis, Harry Lime, "waltz-struggle" for Carl's stuffed rabbit on the
Prater ferris wheel in Vienna. Harry eventually gives Carl a final, and
presumably fatal, push and "waltzes off with the rabbit" (128). In the
next scene, the urine-swilling Dr. Todesrocheln asks a frightened
Anna "WO 1ST DEIN BRUDER?" before transforming before her
eyes into the Baltimore doctor from the play 's opening scene. Anna,
suddenly realizing that she is now "awake," rushes to Carl's bedside,
only to find him "stiff beneath a white sheet" ( 130). To the tempo of
"The Emperor Waltz" Anna tries to revive her dead brother, but to no
avail. In the play 's closing sequence, how~ver, we are briefly
transported back to the realm offantasy. As the stage directions read,
"Softly, a Strauss waltz begins. Carl . .. , perfectly well, waits for
Anna. They waltz off as the lights dim" (132). This final tableau,
reminiscent as it is of the scene near the end of Tony Kushner's Angels
in America: Millennium Approaches, where Prior is permitted one last
dance with Louis (114),8 is of course doubly encoded with meaning.
The waltz, traditionally a dance of courtship, is here inverted as the
8 A further connection between the two plays is that actor/director Joe Mantello
originated the roles of Louis and Carl in the initial New York productions of Angels
in America and The Baltimore Waltz. Mantello also directed the New York premiere
of Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, discussed below.
Brothers' Keepers I 29
danse macabre, in which Anna is literally partnered with death in the
form of her brother, their rehearsal of a familiar, repetitive, and
circular twostep a moving attempt on Anna 's-and Vogel 's-part to
forestall the return to "reality" that Freud, for one, sees as the
normative end point of the work of mourning.
In his essay "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud distinguishes
between two types of mourning. What he labels so-called "normal"
mourning manifests itself initially in individuals as opposition to the
abandoning of libidinal attachment to the deceased or lost object,
but whose work is eventually completed through first the hypercathecting and then the detachment of "memories and expectations
. .. bound to the [lost] object," resulting in a return to "reality" (24445). By contrast, the so-called "pathological" condition of mourning,
what Freud refers to as "melancholia," arises essentially from a
narcissistic prolonging of libidinal attachment, or ego-identification,
with the lost object (see 250 and ff.). As Freud pithily summarizes,
"In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego itself' (246). 9
Following the Freudian model, then, Gillis's addition of
Landscape and Torn Roots, Broken Branches to her repertoire, her
apparently compulsive repetition (to allude to another of Freud's
famous theories) of them on stages across the world, suggests that
she is performing "melancholia" rather than "mourning." Even the
lyrics of O'Connor's song-"So I'm stretched on your grave and
will lie there forever/If your hands were in mine, I'd be sure we'd
not sever"-are suggestive of deeper-than-"normal" attachment. So
too with Vogel. In her "Playwright's Note," she states that she began
writing The Baltimore Waltz as a way of exorcising her own personal
demons vis-a-vis guilt about not accompanying her brother on his
last tour of Europe. But while Freud insists that melancholia "is
marked by a determinant which is absent in normal mourning" (250!,
he also never defines what "normal" signifies in this context (nor
even what a return to "reality" might look like). Indeed, as Butler
has argued, it is melancholia which is in fact constitutive of normative
social relations within Western culture, a process which sees
9 To be sure, as Butler notes, Freud was not always consistent in his theorizing
of the differences between mourning and melancholia. See Butler, Precarious Life,
20-21 ; and Freud, "The Ego and the ld."
30 I Dickinson
heterosexual genders, for example, institutionalize and memorialize
themselves precisely through a refusal of mourning, that is, through
the renunciation of the loss of homosexual genders as "a possibility
of love" (Bodies That Matter 235).
Butler's theorization of heterosexual gender identification as a
kind of melancholia, in which unresolved same-sex desire is
internalized as a prohibition that precedes the incest taboo, has been
articulated in different ways across the body of her work, including
most representatively Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. 10
However, it is in Antigone's Claim, via her reading of Sophocles' play
(structurally the concluding part of his Oedipus trilogy, but, crucially
in terms of chronology of composition, the first part to be written),
and its treatment in Western philosophical discourse, that Butler
demonstrates most forcefully how gender melancholia has helped
structure and hierarchize kinship patterns in our society, patterns
whose markers of exclusion only fully emerge in death and the
performance of mourning. And, in whose normative constitution we
also, per force, witness a perverse negation, or non-consummation of
the family romance: as Butler puts it, "Antigone, who concludes the
oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama"
(Antigone's Claim 76). At the same time, the prohibition against incest
enacted in Sophocles' play, according to Butler, is really something
of a red herring. What is more important is how that prohibition has
symbolically come to be memorialized as standing in for other
socially taboo, morally denigrated, and juridically invalid relationships, modes of gender expression, sexuality, and ways of being and
loving in this world, ways that continue to be placed outside the
bounds of the normalized nuclear family and -the human, and thus
subject to social scrutiny, regulation and policing by the state:
10
See Butler, Gender Trouble, 63ff; and Bodies That Matter, 235-6 and ff. See,
as well, the following comments by Gayle Rubin in "The Traffic in Women": " ... the
incest taboo presupposes a prior, less articulate taboo on homosexuality. A prohibition
against some heterosexual unions assumes a taboo against nonheterosexual unions.
Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be
directed toward the other sex. The sexual division of labour is implicated in both
aspects of gender-male and female it creates them, and it creates them heterosexual"
( 180). And this from Monique Wittig: "the straight mind continues to affirm that incest,
and not homosexuality, represents its major interdiction. Thus, when thought by the
straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality" (The Straight Mind 28).
Brothers' Keepers I 31
When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a
love that is not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy
realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure
in an ontologically suspended mode .... Do we say that
families that do not approximate the norm but mirror the
norm in some apparently derivative way are poor copies, or
do we accept that the ideality of the norm is undone precisely
through the complexity of its instantiation? For those
relations that are denied legitimacy, or that demand new
terms of legitimation, are neither dead nor alive, figuring
the nonhuman at the border of the human. And it is not simply
that these are relations that cannot be honored, cannot be
openly acknowledged, and cannot therefore be publicly
grieved, but that these relations involve persons who are
also restricted in the very act of grieving, who are denied
the power to confer legitimacy on loss. (Antigone 's Claim
78-9; emphasis in original)
To put this in more familiar contemporary terms, what if today
Antigone were attempting to mourn the death of her common-law
husband, a former step-daughter from a second marriage that had
ended but with whom she was still close, a gay male friend she cared
for throughout a prolonged illness, her lesbian lover? In this respect,
the force of Antigone's protest, like Gillis's and Vogel's, comes
through the staging of their private sisterly grief in very public acts
of ritualized remembrance, acting out, and up, performing the
personal as political as a direct intervention against a state-sponsored
discourse about who can and cannot be mourned, about what, to use
Butler's phrasing, remains unspeakable, and unspeakably violent,
about any encounter with difference (see Precarious Life 48-9). As
Phelan remarks, Antigone and-lest we forget-Ismene, both equally
caught, in their different ways of mourning, between life and death,·
point "to a different form of theatre sisters might one day invent.
Such a theatre would be more precise than Sophocles's or Lacan's
about the distinction between desire and Jove" (16). 11
11 In their remarks on Sophocles's play, both Phelan and Butler are drawing on
and revising Lacan's famous reading of Antigone in his Seminar VII. For Lacan,
Antigone bridges not only the divide between life and death, but also between the
imaginary and the symbolic, her defiance of Creon and the law of the father in death
a necessary consequence of her tainted birth.
32 I Dickinson
Moreover, as Douglas Crimp has pointed out, "for Freud,
[mourning] is a solitary undertaking" (236); at no time does he
conceive of it as a shared activity. And it is on this account that I
consider the works by Gillis and Vogel to challenge fundamentally
the standard Freudian model of mourning. This is also where the
concept of performance becomes crucial. For performance, it seems
to me, whether we are using the term in a "theatrical" or "theoretical"
(i.e. Austinian-Derridean-Butlerian-Sedgwickian speech act) sense,
always requires an audience. Gillis's and Vogel's public performance
of their bereavement, like Fuchs's description of the public displaying
of the Quilt, their invitation to audiences to join the dance, as it were,
is not capitulation to the singular oppression of grief, but rather an
acknowledgment of community, a symbolic representation of
collective struggle in response to an unprecedented social crisis, one
that allows for the sharing of loss as a precursor to organization and
demand for -change. 12
And yet, as Crimp has also pointed out, while collective public
mourning rituals have their own affective and even political force,
"they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent,
sentimental, defeatist-a perspective only reinforced ... by media
constructions of [both mourners and mourned] as hapless victims"
(234). Crimp casts aside Freud's interdiction that "any interference
with [mourning is] useless or even harmful" (Freud 244), and argues
instead for an active-and activist-channelling of grief and loss into
the forceful mobilizing of the tenuous collective social body that AIDS
has per force made not just of the queer community, but of us all:
We can then partially revise our sense ... of the incompatibility between mourning and activism and say that, for
12 In this regard, it is important to remember that the dance and theatre
communities have been at the forefront of mobilizing in the fight against AIDS: think
of the DIFFA Dance and Design Project or Equity Cares/Broadway Fights AIDS in
New York; think of Dancers for Life or Theatre Cares Week here in Canada. Likewise,
I think that it is also important to note, especially within the context of the argument
set forth at the outset to this paper, that I attended and was profoundly moved by local
performances of the above works by Vogel and Gillis (in 1993 and 1994, respectively)
precisely at the height of my volunteer involvement with the AIDS community in
Vancouver. See, as well , in this regard Marita Sturken's Tangled Memories : The
Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, which likewise
discusses Freud's dismissal of "the role of collective mourning" (201) within the
context of the "conversations with the dead" enacted through the AIDS Quilt.
Brothers' Keepers I 33
many gay men dealing with AIDS deaths, militancy might
arise from conscious conflicts within mourning itself, the
consequence, on the one hand, of "inadvisable and even
harmful interference" with grief and, on the other, of the
impossibility of deciding whether the mourner will share
the fate of the mourned. (237)
As I have already intimated, my only revision to Crimp's
comments here would be that I think it's important, in true Greek
fashion, to extend the "shared fate" of mourning (and the militancy
it might inspire) in this context beyond "gay men dealing with AIDS
deaths." What the work of Gillis and Vogel teaches is that every
remembering self is inextricably connected to the production and
circulation of larger patterns of cultural memory; no act of
remembrance can occur without a simultaneous act of empathic
identification (meaning, in this context, projecting one's consciousness into the subjective experience of another in order to attempt to
comprehend that experience). In Torn Roots, Broken Branches and
The Baltimore Waltz, a sister uses the language of words and the
language of the body to reconfigure time and space, imagining herself
into the experience of her brother's death, which must also in some
senses be her own-and, just as importantly, our own. In the process,
the performance of mourning transforms into a performance of
protest. In the words of Jill Dolan, Gillis and Vogel are using "the
emotion theater inspires to move people to political action, to desire
reconfigured social relations, to want to interact intimately with a
local and a global community" (90). This harnessing of emotion to
action, or even activism as Dolan notes in the subtitle to her book,
is what's key. In this sense, it is important to distinguish empathy
from what Kushner has identified as the bugbear of catharsis, which,
in a neat little capitalist equation, involves an initial expenditure of
emotion for a guaranteed return of transcendence ("Notes" 22). By
contrast, empathy implies some sense of relationality on the part of
producer and consumer (or actor and spectator), an acknowledgment
that both are in the event, that the liveness of theatre creates a space
in which we can collectively "engage with the social in physically,
materially embodied circumstances" (Dolan 90). SILENCE =
DEATH, the ACT UP activist slogan, like the performances of Gillis's
dance movements and Vogel's play, gives voice to our rage and anger
and profound sense of loss; but its rhetorical power, again like the
34 I Dickinson
work of Gillis and Vogel, is ultimately choric rather than
ventriloquized, encouraging us, inducing us, moving us, to lend our
voices to the clarion call for action. We are all our brothers' keepers;
and we could all do with sisters as keenly vigilant in reminding us
of this point as Gillis and Vogel.
Melancholic Spectatorship: McNally and Kaufman
Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi recasts the Biblical passion play
as a coming-of-age story, set in the small Texas town of the
playwright's birth, with the role of Jesus as an initially socially
leprous and later progressively more charismatic gay youth named
Joshua, who spreads the gospel of love with his "chosen family" of
twelve gay brothers, including his sometime lover Judas. Previewing
at the Manhattan Theatre Club in late September 1998, the play, by
virtue of its subject matter and not least because of the bomb threats,
hate mail and picketing that greeted its premiere, became a proleptic
and de facto memorialization of and performative mourning for
Matthew Shepard when the latter's beaten body was found tied to a
fence outside Laramie, Wyoming six days before the play's official
opening on October 13. Lest we not see the connection, the
playwright himself makes it explicit for us in the preface to the
published version of the play: "Beaten senseless and tied to a splitrail fence in near-zero weather, arms akimbo in a grotesque
crucifixion, [Matthew Shepard] died as agonizing a death as another
young man who had been tortured and nailed to a wooden cross at a
desolate spot outside Jerusalem known as Golgotha some 1,998 years
earlier. They died, as they lived, as brothers" (vi).
The play's central theatrical conceit is that it makes explicit the
performative scaffolding of such narrative and historical equations
by having the actors in the company "assume" their characters' roles
on stage in front of the audience. With house lights still up, and while
members of the audience are still finding their way to their seats,
thirteen male actors, clad identically in white shirts and khaki pants
(blue jeans in the production I saw), slowly make their way to the
stage as if for a casual rehearsal rather than an actual performance,
pausing to chat with one another, greet members of the audience,
check the props table, and limber up with various physical and vocal
exercises. At a pre-arranged signal, one of the actors steps forward
and speaks directly to the audience, announcing that the story he
Brothers' Keepers I 35
and his cast mates are about to tell is an "old and familiar one," one
we've "all heard over and over, again and again," but that "bears
repeating": "The playwright asks your indulgence, as do we, the
actors. There are no tricks up our sleeves. No malice in our hearts.
We're glad you're here" (1). We then watch as this same actor, who
will shortly assume the role of John the Baptist, calls forth each of
his fellow actors in tum, blessing them first by their real names before
rebaptizing them by the name of one of Joshua I Jesus' twelve
disciples.
On a raked proscenium stage, such as the one at the Manhattan
Theatre Club, the effect of this opening would, I imagine, be
disconcerting enough. In the intimate confines of Festival House,
on Vancouver's Granville Island, where I saw Hoarse Raven
Theatre's production of the play in May 2002 (see figure 2), the
whole thing felt painfully voyeuristic: a spare studio space devoid
of a raised stage, fixed seating, or anything even remotely resembling
wings, means that actors and audience are quite literally on top of
one another and-as McNally has staged things-wont to bump into
each other in queuing to get into the room. Indeed, it left me, at
certain moments, longing for the return of theatre's invisible fourth
Figure 2: The cast of Hoarse Raven Theatre's Vancouver production of Corpus Christi,
May 2002 (Photo © David Cooper; reprinted by kind permission)
36 I Dickinson
wall. This is, of course, precisely the point. In watching this play, as
intensely moving and romantic and erotic as so many parts of it are,
we are meant to feel uncomfortable, to question whether or not the
performance has started, whether it has ended, who precisely is part
of the action, whether the actors are playing a version of themselves
or their characters or both, and how precisely we in the audience are
meant to respond to such alienated and alienating transformations.
Something similar takes place in Moises Kaufman and Tectonic
Theater Project's (TTP) play, The Laramie Project. Famous for its
documentary-style approach to historical moments in queer history,
the company had previously scored an unexpected international hit
with Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. For The
Laramie Project, which opened at the Denver Centre Theatre
Company in February 2000, members of TIP travelled to the
Wyoming town, then recently and unwantedly memorialized via the
international media as the redneck locus of Matthew Shepard's brutal
murder, in order to conduct interviews with its traumatized residents.
A narrator who speaks directly to the audience (as, indeed, do all
the "characters" in the play) opens by summarizing the process of
its creation:
On November 14, 1999, the members of Tectonic Theater
Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, and conducted
interviews with the people ofthe town. During the next year,
we would return to Laramie several times and conduct over
two hundred interviews. The play you are about to see is
edited from those interviews, as well as from journal entries
by members of the company andoother found texts.
(Company member Greg Pierotti 5) The last line of this passage highlights an important feature of
The Laramie Project's docudrama--or, more properly, dramatized
documentary-narrative aesthetic. That is, the TTP actors, in addition
to impersonating on stage the various real-life residents of Laramie
whom they interviewed, turning each into a "character" (in both the
conventional dramatic sense of playing a part and the broader sense
of conveying an individual's distinctive traits or eccentricities through
manner of speech, mannerisms, style of dress, etc.), must also deal
with the fact that the play likewise turns each of them into a character.
This becomes all the more apparent if one attends a production of
the play that is being performed by any company or cast other than
Brothers' Keepers I 37
the original TTP ones. Such was the case when I caught a
performance of Studio 58's production of the play in October 2002
(see figure 3). A respected actor training program affiliated with
Vancouver's Langara College, Studio 58 presented audiences who
attended its brilliant staging of The Laramie Project with the
spectacle of student-actors playing professional actors playing real
people, some of whom , as has been the case with many productions
of the play across North America since its premiere, could potentially
have been in the audience watching their surrogate-selves on stage
on any given night.
The use of the narrator throughout the play to introduce both the
speech of the actor-characters and the resident-characters is also
integral in orienting-or disorienting-the audience's relationships
with the action being portrayed on stage. It is akin to Brechtian
quotation, in which lines are spoken not as if they were being spontaneously improvised but rather almost in the manner of reading a report.
This distancing effect means that we, in the audience, are compelled
not to judge the person doing the speaking but rather the words he/
she speaks, and the larger social attitudes these words betray. In terms
Figure 3: Members of the cast of Studio 58 's Vancouver production of Th e Laramie
Project, October 2002; Left to right: Nick Ko, Rebecca Auerbach, Rachel Robillard,
Ben Geldreich, Dan Thomas, and Debbie Love (Photo© David Cooper; reprinted by
kind permission)
38 I Dickinson
of the work of memorialization and the performance of mourning
operating in The Laramie Project, such a structural device again
functions in two ways--on the one hand, disabusing potentially smug
audience members of many of the prejudices they may have held
towards the residents prior to the performance, and, on the other,
dramatizing the important educational process that the actors themselves must go through in confronting their own preconceptions about
the individuals they were going to interview or portray.
In short, McNally and Kaufman, following from Brecht's famous
theorization of the Alienation-effect's application to the technique
of acting, are asking each actor who speaks their words to "invest
what he [sic] has to show with a definite gest of showing," whereby
gest refers to "the mimetic and gestural expression of the social
relationships between people of a given period" (136, 139). In so
doing, these two queer playwrights are, like Brecht, urging both
actors and audiences to adopt "socially critical" attitudes: "In his
exposition of the incidents and in his characterization of the person
[the actor] tries to bring out those features which come within
society's sphere. In this way his performance becomes a discussion
(about social conditions) with the audience he is addressing. He
prompts the spectator to justify or abolish these conditions according
to what class [or gender or sexuality or race or nationality] he belongs
to" (Brecht 139). "Look what they did to Him. Look what they did
to Him," the actor playing James the Less addresses the audience at
the end of Corpus Christi, coming "out of character" and gesturing
to the naked body of Joshua crucified on a cross. The actor's
Brechtian transposition of his speech into the third person and the
past tense here (see Brecht 138) lets neither the actor playing Joshua
nor us in the audience off the hook, as it were. Looking in this context
becomes precarious-reinforced by the fact that, in the production I
saw, all of the other actors exited the studio shortly after this point
as the house lights once again came up, leaving the audience to gaze
upon the twisted body of the actor playing Joshua for what seemed
to be an excruciatingly long time, wondering this time whether the
"performance" was over and, if so, whether we should clap or
continue to sit in stunned silence. Similarly, in the Epilogue to The
Laramie Project, the actor playing TTP company member Greg
Pierotti playing gay Laramie resident Jonas Slonaker frames the
question "What's come out of this?" (and presumably this applies
Brothers' Keepers I 39
in equal measure to the play we are currently watching I reading
and to the murder of Shepard memorialized by it) in terms of a
juxtaposition between first and third person, past and present:
Change is not an easy thing, and I don't think people were
up to it here. They got what they wanted. Those two boys
got what they deserve, and we look good now. Justice has
been served. The OK Corral.... The town's cleaned up, and
we don't need to talk about it anymore.
You know, it's been a year since Matthew Shepard died,
and they haven't passed shit in Wyoming ... at a state level,
any town, nobody anywhere, has passed any kind of Jaws,
antidiscrimination laws or hate crime legislation, nobody
has passed anything anywhere. (99; second ellipsis in
original)
Both speeches force us to interrogate in the present how we have
memorialized similar scenes of trauma~in this case, most
pertinently, but by no means only, anti-gay and lesbian violenceand our respective identifications or disidentifications with both the
"Him" and the "they"-not to mention the "we" and the "you"--of
such scenes.
Here I waf.lt to link up my all-too cursory redaction of the
structural conventions of these two plays to the theoretical
ruminations on mourning undertaken in connection with Gillis and
Vogel. I suggest that part of the social discussion we in the audience
are being asked to engage in by the performers has to do with
critically unpacking the complex codes of masculinity operating
within the heartland of rural America, and, more specifically,
analyzing with whom, in the ritualized violence that all too frequently
accompanies the articulation of those codes, we empathize when we
mourn. Here, too, I want to bring in the work of JoAnn Wypijewski,
who in a 1999 Harper's article entitled "A Boy's Life" has written
what I believe to be the most critically astute analysis of Matthew
Shepard's murder, wading through "the quasi-religious characterizations of Matthew's passion, death and resurrection as patron saint
of hate-crime legislation" to zero in on the "everyday life of hate
and hurt and heterosexual culture" that constituted the "psychic
terrain" of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, Shepard's
murderers (62). Following from Wypijewski, then, it seems to me
that the crucial question posed by Corpus Christi and The Laramie
40 I Dickinson
Project (albeit retrospectively in the case of McNally's play), is why
is it that, in the ritual re-membering of this hate-crime (in the media
and elsewhere), Shepard, as passive sufferer, automatically becomes
representative of all homosexual people, whereas McKinney and
Henderson, as violent aggressors, are always discussed in terms of
their individual predispositions towards delinquency? Why, in other
words, aren't McKinney and Henderson seen, why aren't they
remembered, as representative of the attitudes of a larger patriarchalheterosexist culture, a "socially instituted melancholia" that, to adapt
Butler, prescribes "how the condemnations under which one lives
[e.g. to be gay is to be less than human] tum into repudiations that
one performs [e.g. it is alright to kill what is not human]" (Antigone's
Claim 80)? 13 A similar sentiment is expressed toward the end of The
Laramie Project by Father Roger Schmit, the Catholic priest whose
own attitudes queer TTP writers and cast members Leigh
Fondakowski and Greg Pierotti were wont to prejudge upon their
initial meeting; Schmit notes:
I think right now our most important teachers must be Russell
Henderson and Aaron McKinney. They have to be our
teachers. How did you learn? What did we as a society do
to teach you that? See, I don' t know if many people wiiilet
them be their teachers. I think it would be wonderful if the
judge said: "In addition to your sentence, you must tell your
story, you must tell your story." (89)
Or, as the "Actor Playing Judas" says about his own character at the
close of Corpus Christi, "Sometimes I mourn for Judas, too" (80).
Other Brothers
The Vancouver premieres of Corpus Christi and The Laramie Project
in 2002 were all the more compelling because for many of us in the
audience the brutal murder of Aaron Webster was still so fresh in
our minds. At 2:30 am on Saturday, 17 November 2001, the naked
body of 41 year-old Webster was found by his friend Tim Chisholm
battered and bleeding in a parking lot near Second Beach in Stanley
Park. The victim of a vicious gay bashing, he died a few minutes
13
That our society largely rejects this kind of memorialization is indicated by
the negative reaction, noted above, to the inscription "for all women who have been
murdered by men" on Beth Alber's Marker of Change monument.
Brothers' Keepers I 41
later in Chisholm's anns as ambulance paramedics tried to save him.
The next day, at an impromptu rally at the comer of Denman and
Davie Streets, members of the gay community listened as police and
politicians labelled the death a hate crime and vowed to act swiftly
to apprehend the perpetrators (see Zacharias). In February 2003, a
nineteen-year-old male suspect was finally arrested in connection
with the crime. Seventeen at the time of the attack, he could not be
identified, and pleaded guilty to manslaughter in juvenile court in
July. On 18 December 2003 he was sentenced to two years in custody
and one year house arrest, the maximum penalty Judge Valmond
Romilly could issue; Romilly explicitly labelled Webster's murder
a hate-crime and berated Crown prosecutors for not trying the case
within this context. Another juvenile who also pleaded guilty to
manslaughter was likewise sentenced to a maximum of three years
in custody on 21 April 2004 (see "Second youth"). Ryan Cran and
Danny Rao, two adults also charged in connection with the case were
tried together in December 2004, with BC Supreme Court Justice
Mary Humphries sentencing Cran to six years in jail for manslaughter
and acquitting Rao due to lack of credible evidence. The verdicts,
together with Humphries' repudiation of Romilly's previous
characterization of Webster's murder as a hate crime, outraged the
queer community and prompted renewed protests (see Bellett).
As part of the community programming around Studio 58's
production of The Laramie Project, Langara College organized a oneday public forum on gay bashing and hate crimes legislation, an issue
that has been much in the air in local queer circles since Webster's
murder, and especially since Judge Romilly's surprisingly forceful
comments. To paraphrase Wypijewski once again, to the extent that
"hate-crime laws symbolize a society's values" (74), they can be
viewed as a fonn of cultural memory work, a process of belatedly
representing in juridical discourse a hitherto actively forgotten fissure
in the social fabric of a community (note, in this regard, how
relatively recently anti-gay violence was included under the purview
of hate crime legislation in Canada, and how most American states
have no legal mechanism to recognize such violence as even
constituting a hate crime). This notion of belatedness points, in tum,
to the fact that what hate-crime legislation actually memorializes is
the crime itself, not the culture of hate and violence that produced
the crime in the first place. To this end, Wypijewski notes, with
42 I Dickinson
characteristic bluntness, that such legislation "means nothing for life
and, because its only practical function is to stiffen penalties,
everything for death"; it also means, in the specific context of gayrelated hate crimes, where "it's always the sexuality of the victim
that's front and center, not the sexuality of the criminal or the
undifferentiated violence he took to extremity," that "straight people
are off the hook" (74, 75). Similarly, as Judith Butler argues in
Excitable Speech, proponents of hate speech regulation, in focussing
on the injury such speech causes to the abjectly governed and
agentless individual addressee (be it a woman, a queer, or a racial
minority), tend to ignore the ways in which their arguments relocate
notions of "sovereignty" and "universality" within a speaker, who
not only says what he means, but whose utterances are immediately
memorialized by others as simultaneously demarcating and
overstepping the borders of what is acceptable. Even more
pertinently,- for Butler, proponents of hate speech laws fail to
recognize how the iterability of such speech is to a large measure
coextensive with and institutionalized within much official "state
speech" (102).
Towards the end of Antigone's Claim, the text that I have been
using as my main critical touchstone throughout this paper, and which
comes as close as any recent treatise I can think of in articulating a
socially relevant theory of queer remembrance and mourning, Butler
notes that what remains "unspoken" in Antigone's grief for her
brother Polyneices is her shared grief for her "other brother[s],"
Eteocles and, not least, Oedipus, both arguably responsible not only
for the "crime" of Polyneices' death, but also for the "crime" of
Antigone's defiant public mourning of that death. As Butler puts it,
"The 'brother' is no singular place for her, though it may be that all
her brothers (Oedipus, Polyneices, Eteocles) are condensed at the
exposed body of Polyneices, an exposure she seeks to cover, a
nakedness she would rather not see or have seen" (79). Likewise, it
seems to me that in our vigils for the Aaron Websters and the
Matthew Shepards of this world, for the Christopher Gillises and
the Carl Vogels, for all our "named and unnamed" queer brothers
and sisters lost prematurely to violent death or disease, or simply
the violence of heteronormative historiography, we must be as, if
not more, vigilant in our remembrance of the un- or underexposed
melancholic keepers of that history, our "other" brothers. For, if part
Brothers' Keepers I 43
of what is enacted in queer rituals of remembrance and queer
performances of mourning is a speaking of the unspeakable, then it
is incumbent upon those of us who undertake such rituals to utter
the silence, to outer the active forgetting, to counter the willful
amnesia at the heart of heterosexual melancholia: that, to adapt
Wypijewski one last time, Aaron Webster and Matthew Shepard, and
Brandon Teena and Sakia Gunn, 14 not to mention the murdered
women from the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and from the
Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, died not because they were queer
or feminist or prostitutes, but because their killers were all straight
men. And it is this disavowal of brotherly love (of the self, of the
same, of the other) at the heart of masculine identity formation that,
above all, our culture must mourn.
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